By Scott Pugnetti, Founder of equals mgmt
I rep directors across five continents. I’ve been doing this for 13 years. And the single biggest waste of time in my working week isn’t admin. It isn’t chasing invoices. It’s the pitch process.
Not because pitching itself is bad. Pitching is how the work gets made. The problem is that we’ve all quietly accepted a version of pitching that costs everyone too much and benefits nobody enough.
I’m talking to you as someone who reps freelance directors, but I know production companies feel this too. You’re producing bids for projects where creative hasn’t been approved yet. You’re managing schedules around jobs that might not exist in two weeks. You already know what I’m about to say because you’ve said it yourself, probably over a drink after a long shoot day, probably to someone who nodded and said “yeah, but what can you do?”
Here’s what we can do. We can name the specific things that are broken and talk about what’s already being done to fix them in other markets.
Unapproved Creative
A director gets a brief. They spend a week writing a treatment, pulling references, putting together a visual approach that’s genuinely personal to them. The production company puts together a bid. Everyone invests real hours.
Then the agency calls. The client didn’t approve the creative. The project’s dead.
That week of work? Gone. For the director, the producer, the rep, the line producer who started calling around about crew. The DRCT Census from 2024 found that directors are spending 30 unpaid hours a week on creative pitches. Production companies absorb hundreds of thousands in bidding costs annually for projects that were never real.
If creative isn’t locked, the brief shouldn’t go out.
Transparency
A production company puts forward a director for a job. They coordinate the schedule, produce the bid, back the treatment. Then they find out six other companies did the same thing for the same brief, and the budget was half what everyone assumed.
That’s not a pitch. That’s a lottery with overhead.
When nobody discloses the shortlist size or the budget, production companies can’t make smart decisions about where to invest their bidding resources. You end up spreading effort across ten pitches when you could’ve gone deep on four that were actually winnable.
There’s another side to this. When a director knows who they’re pitching against, the treatment gets better. If you know the other directors on the shortlist, you know their strengths. You know what they’ll lean into. So you stop writing a generic treatment and start writing one that plays to what makes you as a director different. The production company backing that director benefits directly - they’re not submitting a safe, middle-of-the-road pitch anymore, they’re submitting something with a point of view. Competition works better when it’s informed. Right now, everyone’s pitching blind and hoping for the best.
Compensation for Pitch Work
A treatment isn’t a CV. It’s original creative work, tailored to a specific brief, for a specific client. Name another profession where you do a full week of speculative creative work with no compensation and a one-in-four (or worse) chance of getting paid.
Germany has started to figure this out. The DRCT and German producers introduced a pitch cost share model in early 2024, where the agency and client cover a portion of the pitching costs rather than leaving production companies and directors to absorb them entirely. The amounts are small relative to the budgets agencies typically operate on, but they make a real difference to the directors and production companies doing the work. By 2024, only 13.5% of German directors were still pitching without a fee. Spain went further - the ADDP held a treatment strike in May 2023, and now a majority of all pitches there are paid.
It’s working. The sky didn’t fall. Production quality didn’t drop. Production companies aren’t eating the full cost of speculative bids anymore. Directors are pitching better because they’re pitching less, for jobs they actually want.
Nobody Designed This System
It’s worth saying: agencies aren’t the villains here. Most agency producers I work with are dealing with their own version of the same problem - clients who change their minds late, procurement departments compressing timelines, internal pressure to present options they know won’t go anywhere. They’re not sending out briefs on unapproved creative because they enjoy wasting people’s time. They’re doing it because the system they inherited rewards volume over quality, and nobody’s given them a reason to push back.
The best agencies we work with already do some of this naturally. They’ll tell us the shortlist size. They’ll share the budget range. They’ll flag when creative is still in flux so we can advise our directors on whether it’s worth the investment. Those conversations aren’t complicated. They just require someone to start them.
The Work Gets Better
A fair pitch process means budget disclosed before anyone commits time. Shortlist size shared upfront. A call before treatment work begins so directors and producers know what they’re actually pitching for. Compensation for pitch work. Feedback when someone doesn’t win.
When those things are in place, the work gets better. Directors pitch fewer jobs but pitch them harder. Production companies back stronger bids because they’re not spreading resources across long-shot pitches. Agencies get treatments that are genuinely tailored to the brief instead of hedged and safe. The creative output improves because the people making it aren’t burned out from pitching ten jobs to win one.
Spain and Germany are already proving this works. The rest of the industry can keep having the same conversation at the bar, or we can start having it properly.
We’ve put together what we think a fair process looks like at pitchreform.com. We’d rather have the conversation than keep complaining about it.
Scott Pugnetti is the founder of equals mgmt, a director representation agency working across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and the US. For more information on pitch reform, visit https://pitchreform.com/
